


Dan Brown Has No Goddamn Idea

by EightMinutesToSunrise



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Blasphemy, CROWLEY WAS MARY MAGDALENE, Crowley's Name is Crawly (Good Omens), Everything I know about the life of Jesus I learned from Jesus Christ Superstar, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Genderfluid Character, I'm just here to roast god and emotionally torture Crowley, Inaccurate Christianity, She/Her Pronouns for Crowley (Good Omens), author is a godless heathen, iiiiiii don't know how to loooooove him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-07 05:02:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20303890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EightMinutesToSunrise/pseuds/EightMinutesToSunrise
Summary: THE GROUPCHAT:Me: Not to get Weird but Crowley is sometimes a woman and uhMe: Mary Magdalene dressed... Like ThatMe: I dont know what im doing Honestly but Crowley bullshits the prostitute story because when he shows up around jesus as a downtrodden woman looking for redemption, calling herself wicked, everyone just assumes...SO ANYWAY I, WHO KNOW NOTHING ABOUT JESUS THAT'S NOT IN JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR, GOT PRESSGANGED INTO WRITING THISI dunno guys it's angsty, sometimes cute, they don't even bang onscreen, it all ends in tears





	Dan Brown Has No Goddamn Idea

The demon Crawly had been a woman for the last hundred years or so, now. A young woman, plainer than when she had called herself a temptress. More shockingly, she had been good for the last hundred years, or at least her best approximation of the thing. She’d helped the elderly and sick. She’d covered the tumbling red curls she was too vain to do away with. She’d asked very few questions.

She hadn’t heard a word from Hell in all that time, and she was beginning to hope her disappearing act had worked.

But neither had she heard any word from Heaven. She had sifted through her wings, preening like a fledgeling, for any trace of pale fresh down. She was no longer taking pilgrimages--her life was one long pilgrimage, attaching herself to one caravan after another and following them to a temple or holy place, praying there, hoping to hear Her voice.

At the top of a mountain whose name she could not remember, surrounded by whispering penitents, Crawly heard his name.

\--

She wasn’t sure what she had expected. A particularly impressive priest of some kind. Someone who could explain God’s will to her, or someone who could call Her up on the speed dial that hadn’t been invented yet. A go-between, who could make Crawly’s case to Her.

A translator. But Jesus of Nazareth was not a translator.

He emerged from a small knot of followers, clad in the same linen tunic they all wore. His hair was long, his eyes clear and clever. Crawly felt his presence like a hundred volts to the wings.

She slipped her sight to another plane, trying to comprehend what she felt. And yes, where the man stood was light, a light Crawly hadn’t seen since she stood in the presence of the divine. Blinding and harsh.

He was already mid-speech when she recovered herself, and she could barely hear what he said through the buzz in her ear--something about throwing stones. Specifically, not doing it, which had Crawly immediately interested. She’d been stoned before; didn’t recommend it.

After he spoke, the crowd dispersed, and Jesus was left with a few stragglers--people who had heard of his power and come to him for advice, or healing. Crawly lurked in the shadows and watched, able to hear him now the square was empty.

“My eyes, I haven’t been able to see since the illness,” a woman said.

“I will do what I can, my child.”

And in Crawly’s second sight, the light shifted, stretched, and the woman sobbed. “I can--” she fell to her knees. “Thank you.”

And Jesus fell beside her, and put his forehead on hers.

For God’s sake, Crawly thought. That was a miracle, and he was a human man.

Or, kind of a human man, at least.

She watched as the last few penitents spoke to him and slipped away. After, he didn’t leave as she expected him to, so that she could follow, but rather sent the few followers who remained away with a word and walked across the square. He would pass close by her, she realized, and she withdrew further into the shadows. He stopped.

“Do you wish that I leave you be, child?”

He was speaking to her. Right into the shadows where she hid. Nothing for it, she supposed, and she stepped into the sun, slinging her hood low to cover her eyes.

“I’m just here to witness.” And she turned away, but stopped at a hand on her shoulder.

“Need I fear you? Or the dark you come from?” Crawly turned, yellow eyes wide. Her heart forgot to beat. She expected him to stumble back in fear, like so many did when they saw her eyes--but he just looked wary. A sheepdog sussing out a potential threat.

His brow furrowed and he took her wrist, felt the lack of a pulse there. “Is that normal for you?”

“...No.” And with an effort, she started her pulse going again.

The furrow remained. “I will never cease to wonder at my Mother’s creations.”

“I don’t think she takes credit for me, anymore.”

“Doesn’t she?”

Crawly winced. “Maybe among her mistakes.”

“I have never met my Mother’s Adversaries, before, but you are not what I expected.”

“I’m, ah, on leave.”

Jesus smiled at that. A small smile, but it came easily to his face. “Then I have little to fear. What do they call you?”

“Crawly.”

“Crawly,” he repeated, hesitant. “She who… crawls?”

“Like a snake.” Jesus’ eyes took on a gentleness she was not sure she liked, a gentleness that knew about that charred place deep in her chest. She continued, “it was just the first thing that came to Lucifer’s mind, I guess. Big black snake wiggling around in the mud.”

Jesus sighed, a healer’s sigh. “It would be hard, I think,” he said, “to seek redemption when one’s very name calls one less than human.”

She shrugged. “It’s what he called me.”

“My mother’s name was Mary.”

Crawly frowned. Tried to make the conversational jump and couldn’t. She settled on, “It’s a beautiful name.”

“I’m glad you like it.” Jesus smiled, and she remembered the glow of the stars she had spun. “Come have dinner with us, Mary.”

\--

Mary ate dinner--or pretended to--in the company of Jesus, his followers, and the twelve men that were called his apostles. Then she stayed overnight, sharing a tent with the few unwed women who followed him. It was dangerous for a woman to travel alone at night, and wasn’t that another conversation she’d love to have with the Almighty.

That night turned into the morning, and by then Jesus had spoken to one of the apostles’ wives, who promptly tucked Mary under her wing. The woman’s name was Flavia, and she reached out familiarly to straighten Mary’s cloak before handing her a pot of porridge that they would distribute to the poor.

Flavia was loose around the edges in a way that suggested she’d once lived a finer life than this, but she didn’t complain at all as she lifted her own, heavier pot and led Mary to the edge of their camp where the hungry had gathered.

“What’s your name, then?” Flavia asked. “All his ‘my friend’ and ‘my child’ is sweet but he’s not the best at introducing a soul.”

“Mary,” she replied, trying the taste of it in her mouth. It tasted sweet and felt tall, not at all like a worm crawling at the feet of her betters.

“It suits you,” Flavia said, and then she praddled on for a while about a funny thing her husband had said about names. Mary half-listened.

The next question came while they spooned out porridge--ladle after ladle until Mary was certain she’d been here for a second eternity.

“What brought you to him?”

Mary gave the same answer she’d given the night before. It seemed just enough to satisfy Jesus’ followers, among whom no sin was secret and forgiveness was common as daylight. “I wish to atone for my past wickedness, and to understand it.”

Flavia nodded kindly. “Many of our number came to Jesus looking to atone. Your past will always be a part of you, but God forgives.”

Does She? Mary wondered silently.

“Where are you from?” Flavia asked.

“Here and there. I’ve been travelling for a while.”

Flavia nodded. “Us, too. It’s the life of the faithful, but to tell you the truth I love it, seeing all this great beautiful world our Lord has provided for us.” She offered a conspiratorial smile, like she was admitting something exciting and a little shameful.

The beggar before them balanced his bowl of porridge on stumps.

“I don’t like it,” Mary replied, realizing it as she spoke. “I’d rather have a place that was my own.”

“Are you married?”

Mary shakes her head, averting her gaze back to the porridge she’s spooning. Flavia nudges her with a grin. “We’ll have to find you a man then! That’s where you’ll find your place.”

There’s a harsh laugh behind them. Mary turns to see one of Jesus’ apostles, whose name she couldn’t be bothered to remember. She knew, though, in the demon-instinct she could never suppress, that he would be easiest of them to tempt.

Flavia puts her ladle down to put both hands on her hips. “You have something to say, Judas?”

“I should not have laughed,” Judas responds, pursing his lips in humility that seems more prim than pious. “But you should not raise her hopes like that, Flavia. We welcome all here, but with her past--”

“Did she tell you, then?”

Judas directs his sigh to Mary, turning away from her argumentative protector. “I am sorry, Mary. But it’s obvious to all of us why you are here, and like any woman Flavia can be--idealistic, in what God’s forgiveness can provide to a sinner.”

Mary’s trying to figure out what he’s getting at. “And what do you think my sin is?”

“It’s easy to see. You’re an unmarried woman travelling alone, atoning for your wickedness. You are not the first good soul seduced to a whore’s life, nor will you be the last, but I won’t lie and say you have an easy path before you.”

Mary says nothing as Judas nods and walks away, willing the laughter to stay off her face. It’s a great alibi, she shouldn’t dismiss it, but it’s also hilarious.

“Oh Mary,” Flavia says softly, mistaking her silence for shame and gathering her in her arms. “Pay no attention to him, Judas has always been cruel. He confesses every sin under the stars but that.”

Face hidden in Flavia’s robes, Mary lets laughter wrinkle her face. She manages a vulnerable “thank you” to encourage the rumor.

Flavia rubs a hand over Mary’s back and pulls away with a kind smile that Mary feels obliged to return. “And between you and me, every woman I’ve ever know who’s made a coin like that has had no other choice, and I’d believe that to be true for you as well. But you’re with us now, and we’ve got better employment for you.”

“A nicer boss, too,” Mary says, and Flavia laughs.

\--

At first, Mary had pretended to sleep, like she had with every other clan she had attached herself to. She hadn’t had the guts to try actually sleeping yet, so she lay on a pallet and recited the poems she’d taken such pains to learn back in Greece, when a clever mind could incite so many sins.

She stopped when she realized how little Jesus himself slept.

Maybe it was the divine in him that kept him awake, but she rather thought it was the humanity--the weight of his great ineffable destiny bringing the nightmares that God had decided humans should have.

One night, a month after she had joined his followers, she stayed up by the fireside. When he rose, shivering, she welcomed him with a smile.

“You should sleep, Mary,” he’d said.

She’d smirked. “No need.”

He’d nodded, taken it in stride. Since then they’d spent many nights like that, looking into the fire or at one another, often in silence, sometimes talking. About the day, about his followers, about the terrible stew that Peter’s wife had made. Sometimes about other things.

“Why did the demons fall?”

She’d known he wondered. “Bad sense of balance.”

Jesus smiled. “I have only known you as a pentitant, it is difficult to imagine what you could have done.”

“Maybe She just didn’t like us,” Mary snapped automatically. Jesus’ eyebrows flew up and she realized her mistake. She bowed her head, focused on repentance, like he taught her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bite your head off like that. I’m still trying to figure it out myself--what I did wrong. There is so much that I don’t understand.”

“You don’t know what you did?”

“I don’t know why it was a crime.” And she was sorry for that, she was. So sorry that when the apostles prayed together, when she really took the time to think about it, it felt like her infernal essence was condensing into slime.

She looked across the fire at him, and for a moment, she saw the face of God. It was the sparks, maybe, or how the heat warped the air between them, that reminded her of the shifting spheres that hung around his heavenly Mother’s throne.

And she was drawn to him. The same way a young angel, created to weave the stars, had been drawn to his Mother. Their Mother, she supposed, but Mary tried not to bend her head around that.

She stood and went to sit beside him,seeking not body heat but something similar. She hated that her voice was little more than a thread when she asked, “do you know about the Flood?”

“Which flood?”

Mary turned back to the fire. “There’s only one, really. I was there. Thousands of years ago, your Mother grew angry with humanity and their misdeeds. And She flooded the continent. She killed millions.”

“She has a reason for everything She does, Mary.” He took her hand. “I know it’s hard to imagine, but you have to trust that. That’s faith.”

“That’s not faith, that’s idiocy. Why Her? I’m just supposed to trust that She had everyone’s best interests at heart when She killed them--She made us all, gave us free will, why do that when the moment we do something wrong She kills?” the questions fell from her lips like maggots, but she couldn’t stop them. “Millenia ago she told us she’d create humans, that she’d test them, that she’d punish the ones who chose evil but Jesus--we didn’t even know what evil was.”

She stands, pacing in frustration. “Why give them the tree? Why put it there in the middle of the garden, knowing they’ll eat from it, if She’ll punish them with death and pain for giving it a go? And what about those little wasps that eat the spiders while they’re still alive? Why create all of these suffering miserable creatures? She already had us, and we--all we did, was sing Her praises. Why was that?”

“Was this it?” he said, tilting his head to the side, and Mary stopped in her tracks.

“Yes. This is why I fell. Because I had the audacity to question this awful, convoluted mess She calls a Plan.”

He rose, and Mary saw what was coming. He’d realize the monster he’d let into his company, and he’d drive her from their camp, like falling or worse, worse because she knew what she was going back to, now.

He embraced her.

“It hurts me too, Mary,” he whispered. “But you have to have faith. You’ve been in Her presence, don’t you remember that? Do you remember Her kindness?”

“How do you know about that?”

“Because I feel it every day. I see it in the eyes of every one of you,” he pulled back, and smiled. There were tears in his eyes to match her own. “In Peter’s blue, in Joshua’s brown. In Simon’s green. And I see Her kindness in your own yellow eyes, Mary. Even if you don’t.”

She let the tears fall, and kissed him.

In a very real way, he kissed her back. And in a way even more real than that--a way that stretched the incandescent fire of his soul, that lit the cobwebbed corners of her fallen Grace--he knew her.

\--

It didn’t escape Mary’s notice that Jesus could not answer her question. He had just told her to have faith, and that didn’t work for her. Faith hadn’t snuck any children into the bowels of the Ark. But her questions had never held her when she cried, or given her a name. So the failings of both question and answer were wrestled to an ephemeral peace. 

She stayed with him. Spent her mornings laughing with Flavia, her afternoons sniping at the apostles, and her nights sitting with Jesus, staring into the fire.

On their first morning in a new town, an oceanside one that smelled fishy and damp, she and Flavia walked arm and arm into the marketplace to trade for plums. As they walked, Mary caught a glimpse of him nearby, walking alongside them.

“Jesus!” she called, smiling. “Walk with us!”

He looked at her like one woken from slumber, shaking confusion from his eyes. “Mary?” he questioned.

“Who else?” she took his arm in her other hand. “Were you following us?”

“I didn’t notice you were here,” he admitted. “But I’m needed up ahead.”

“Oh?”

“Soon. A few minutes from now, I think.” He said it uncertainly. He had never come to trust this instinct, Mary knew. Sometimes it got him hurt. Sometimes he followed it like one sleepwalking, like he had no will to resist the pull of humanity’s need for him.

They never failed to need him. There was shouting up ahead.

“I told you to stay away from my house, you stinking RAT--”

Jesus disappeared from their side. Mary pushed through the crowd gathering, clearing a path for her and Flavia to the doorstep of a wealthy home that leaned over the street. A stout, snarling man hung from the doorframe, the steps giving him high vantage over the boy who had fallen into the mud below.

Not a boy, Mary realized, a man, barely. He was seventeen at most, and a fisherman’s net lay beside him.

The young man gets up, gathering up a few meager coins and tucking them back into his pockets, then stands sharply and launches himself at the man in the doorway, shoving him back through the door.

“Why are you so horrible?” he shouts. “I won’t even speak to you, I never wanted to speak to you.” He seizes a rock from beside the door and hefts it.

Inside the house, Mary’s keen hearing heard an old woman weep.

The stout man sneered and grabbed something from beside the door, something long and sharp. An ornate fishing spear, meant to display. He hurled it at the young man, who seemed to move through molasses--

And then the spear stopped, clattered to the ground. And between the men in the street was Jesus, an arm raised to block it.

It had hit his wrist. It should have gone clear through it.

“Are you Daniel?” Jesus said to the man who flung the spear.

“Who’s asking?”

“I am.”

The man frowned, taken aback. He nodded despite himself.

“And you,” Jesus said to the young man. “You are Saul, son of Daniel?”

“He’s no son of mine,” the older growled.

Jesus looked back at him. Mary knew that look, that deep empathetic sadness that mourned for your very soul. “Isn’t he?”

“I--”

“He’s your mother’s grandson, Daniel.” Inside, the old woman’s crying quieted. “What has he done, that is so terrible?”

No one responded. But when people told the story, they would relate it all, and Mary would think that the son had the right of it.

The son dropped the stone he still held loose in his hand. “Let me speak to her, father,” he said quietly. “If only to say goodbye.”

And the father stood aside. The old woman ran from the house and took her grandson in her arms, and as they rocked back and forth, sharing whispers, Jesus appeared at Mary’s side.

“We’ve been here barely a day,” Mary said, gaze fixed on the pair in the street.

Jesus smiled. “Should I have rested?”

“Did you know it wouldn’t harm you?” Flavia tittered, grabbing his wrist to turn it in her hands.

“I thought it might not,” Jesus replied. “Not yet.”

Flavia patted his arm helplessly and led him and Mary both back to camp, her hoped-for plums abandoned.

That night, Mary magicked up an alabaster box, brimming with a fine lotion she’d touched in a shop years before. She stroked it into Jesus’ brow while he stared into the fire. Everyone made a fuss about it, and Mary couldn’t bring herself to care.

\--

Jesus smiled up at Mary where she stood on the ledge above him, and it warmed her heart. “What are you looking at?” she teased.

“Nothing, can’t see anything with the glare.” He gestured at the sun, laughing at her frown. She wasn’t used to his jokes about her vanity, even after two years by his side. She had spent so long treating it like a blade at her throat but maybe this was better--just a silly thing to outgrow.

He climbed up the last scramble to join her on the ledge. Together, they looked out at the valley below--sage-green fields stretching far and away until they melt into drifts of desert. God’s Earth was drier than Eden, and Mary might have thought She had taken the water in their punishment, but that seemed more subtle than Mary expects from Her.

Looking at the same beautiful view, Jesus sighed, and she was surprised to see the pain in his eyes. “What did you wish to show me, Mary?”

“You sound resigned.”

“I know you, Mary. It will be three hundred years yet before anyone knows you better than I.” --Mary wasn’t gonna touch that comment with a ten foot pole-- “And I know what you’re going to do.”

“You can’t. Just--just listen to me for a moment.” She swallowed, tucked her hands into the folds of her cloak. “You’re special. You’re the most special person I’ve ever known. And people love you! They just--you speak to them like no one else does, and that’s not just because you’re, well, whatever you are. Jesus, you could rule the world.”

Jesus winced. “I can’t, Mary. I have no desire to rule the world.”

“I said that poorly. You could help the world. Heal it. Make it so much better than it is!” She swept a hand over the landscape and the world shifted around them. The plains turned to desert and there--her beloved Pyramids of Giza. Such a monument to the bitter refusal to surrender to Death. In spite of himself, Jesus stared in wonder.

“Where are we?”

“Not far,” Mary said, shading her eyes from the blinding sun. “Egypt. You could be here in a few months’ travel, longer if you had an army behind you. I’d handle the army.”

She tried to exchange a smile with him, another tease--but there was only fear in his eyes. She moved on quickly. Another gesture, another shift, and they were in--

\--the high mountains of the Andes. The air is thin, and Jesus gasps. Mary puts a hand to his chest, expands his lungs and leaves it there a moment. Steals time to feel the human heartbeat that powers the inhuman man.

“We’re on the other side of the world,” she said.

“The other side--”

“The early days of the Mayan Empire. They’re writing with knotted ropes, and they know the secrets of the stars better than the scholars in Rome.”

She called the knowledge into her fingers and placed them at his temples, showed what she couldn’t tell him about the knowledge that was being uncovered there. “Maybe it’s not romantic, but these people invent a bureaucracy that fuels an empire. Millions of people, safe and fed, and cared for. They’d follow you. They’d think you were a god.” And what a god he would be.

He took her wrists and pulled them away from his head. “And what then? I will die one day, Mary. I rule the world with the people’s love, with Egypt’s treasures and Mayan secrets but--why would you want me to?”

“Why?” how could he be so stupid, she thought. “Don’t you see? You could save them.”

And she shifted their world once again.

They were on a deep mud plain, its bounds invisible in the morning fog. Cries of pain unfurled around them as soldiers died in the muck. Jesus fell to his knees before the closest man, tried to work a miracle and failed.

Mary knelt beside him, gently, and went to push the man’s stringy black hair from his eyes to no effect. “We’re not here, Jesus. You can’t change this yet.”

There was a flash of rage in his eyes. “Then why did you take me here?”

“They call it the Red Eyebrow Rebellion,” she said, instead, running a gentle finger over the wounded man’s fire-dyed eyebrows. “These are peaceful men, farmers. Dying in war against the ruler of their land.” She raised her gaze to meet his. “They wouldn’t rebel against you.”

And in his eyes, she saw nothing but fear. He looked at the man, looked at her. Reached out like one in a trance, to run a finger over her own blazing red brow.

In the millenia that followed, Mary would twist and pull at this moment like a rubix cube. Asking what Jesus had been thinking. She hopes vindictively that he was only afraid, afraid of what his Mother would do to him if he didn’t follow her precious plan. But she knows that it had been more complicated than that.

Jesus was a true believer. He wasn’t following Her plan because it was Hers, he followed it because he thought it best.

Thought it best that he left humanity to rot, when his power could have been their salvation.

“No,” he had said.

Thirteen hundred years later, hiding in the deepest reaches of a Spanish prison and surrounded by the stench of rotting, living flesh, the demon finally got drunk enough to tell a nearby rat that Jesus deserved everything God’s plan brought him.

Then he ate the rat.

\--

Mary found the house in Bethany burned to the ground. Soldier’s bootprints everywhere, spots of blood that she wished she couldn’t taste. He is gone, his followers scattered to the winds, and she collapses into the dust and does not cry.

“Crawly.”

Of course he would be here. How silly of her.

“Of course I would. Did you think I wouldn’t be able to find you because you grew a pair of tits? Darling, please.” He pulls a crate alongside her crumpled form and takes a seat, crossing one leg over the other beneath his scarlet robes. He hasn’t manifested any shoes--There’s a razor-sharp hoof dangling in Mary’s face.

“You know who I am?” Mary whispers.

Lucifer smiles. “I’ve never spoken to you directly before, have I? Of course I know who you are, I take a special interest. You’re the bloody Serpent of Eden. I told you to cause some trouble and you invented original sin. Crawly, baby, I’m your biggest fan.”

“Did you do this?” 

Lucifer chuckles. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Nope, nothing to do with it. Just like we learned with the ark, didn’t we--when it all comes down to it, God doesn’t need us for the real horrors. She can kill your dear little lamb all on her own. All part of her big ineffable story, our mumsy dearest.” He frowns. “You’re a part of it too, you know.”

She’s going to throw up.

“Took him to Mount Quarantania, didn’t you? Heaven of a place to watch the sun set. Told him all the good he could do on Earth, if he made himself a king?”

“They wanted it. Tried to give him a crown. He could have had--”

“All the kingdoms of the world.”

The words turn to dust in her mouth. She nods. Lucifer rises from the crate he’s made his throne and kneels beside her. Takes her by the chin and makes her yellow eyes meet his red ones.

“They’ll call it his last temptation. The powers of Satan trying their damndest to, well, damn him.” He pulls a curl from the cloak she wears and winds it around a sharp nail. “That’s what I needed you to learn, sweet thing. I can’t just tell you something like this, I already have. You try to play by Her rules and She’ll just pull you back into her little puppet dance. Everyone look at the nasty prancing demon.”

Lucifer pushed back her hood, ran a hand through her curls--gentle, assessing--and sighed. “I’m sending you to Rome, little thing,” he said. “Put on some pants and get back into it, there’s nothing better for a broken heart. And Rome is the place to do it. Augustus will die soon, and the Senate’s not coming back. Won’t that be a treat for you?”

“Will they remember him at all?” she asked.

“Augustus?”

Mary glared at him, willing hellfire into her eyes to evaporate the threat of tears.

“Of course they will. He’s changed everything. Give it a few years and you won’t be able to walk down a street without a reminder of your dalliance with the Lord’s spawn. Best you get over it now.”

He rose to his cloven feet and brushed off the dust that wouldn’t have dared land on his robes. He offered a hand and pulled it away when she reached for him--his smirk sharp as glass. “And lose the hair, baby. Too much baggage. Reminds me of this pathetic fledgling I knew, used to hang around me and my friends. Trailing after greater angels and begging answers to questions he had no right to ask.”

Crawly flinched away from Lucifer’s gaze, and stayed on the ground long after he was gone.

\--

Crawly tried to stay away. But something in her had to be there to see it done, and she refused to examine whether that was a masochistic impulse (bad) or a sadistic one (good, that would be good). So she waited in the shadows like she had two years before, and she came face to face with him again.

They had taken the long way through the city, that’s how it happened. They came from behind her. By the time she realized it she was frozen in horror. The guards around him were laughing, the mob screaming, and there was an honest-to-Satan carrion bird flying from rooftop to rooftop overhead.

There was blood running into his starlight eyes.

Before she knew what she was doing she was at his side, magicking a white cloth into her hand to wipe away the blood and sweat. She was too fast for the guards to stop her, and then they were laughing too hard.

“Look who it is,” one cried. “The King’s Whore.”

“Can’t imagine she’ll stay out of the brothels long without you around, little king.”

“Got a coin for you if you want to start now.”

It wasn’t accurate, but was true, and Crawly saw in Jesus’ face that he knew. She pulled back.

“Mary,” he said, voice hoarse. “Tell me you won’t crawl again. Don’t let him make you something you aren’t.”

“I could say the same to you, about Her,” she whispered back.

“Keep your faith, hide it away until you need it,” he said. “It won’t be the End.”

She let the cloth drop from her hand--and there was something on it, something that wasn’t blood or tears but glimmered like it was Hers--and ran.

\--

She neither heard his last words nor caught his eye as he died.

She stood a distance away, shivering as his light that had crept into her ascended from the Earth.

The angel was there.

Of course the angel was there. She hadn’t seen him since… well, since the last of the children she’d abandoned at his hut had died of old age.

He’d made a habit of turning up on the worst days of her life. If she tried, would she remember him swinging that flaming sword around when Uriel shoved her off a cloud?

Pulled by some ineffable force, she walked to him. Let herself age and sharpen into a woman he would recognize, let a slink settle into her limbs that replaced Mary’s lively stride.

The angel’s hands clutched at one another, his eyes were wide and fearful, and he was everything that she had ever hated about heaven. A fixed point, immutable. No terror could turn them from their Great Purpose, no questions, no murder.

Angels were accomplices.

“Come to smirk at the poor bugger, have you?” she asked.

The angel wrung his hands faster and there was a vindictive stab in her gut at his unease. He was shedding uncertainty and guilt like expensive perfume. He was such a fool, and anger turns to something like pity and--

“--on policy decisions, Crawly.”

The world stopped. And Mary died, and dragged Crawly down with her.

“Oh, I’ve changed it,” the demon said.

Crowley left for Rome that evening, and walked all through the night.


End file.
